[plug] Embarassing debian question

[Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima]

On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima wrote:

> Hello all,
> 	Well I come to you all with my cap in hand and ask a simple question.
> 
> When I wasn't in the country, someone "upgraded" a production server to
> sid (doh).  I was curious to see how this would behave.  While I don't have 
> any major problems with sid interms of stability. Sid is a moving
> target and it's moving fairly quickly.  I spend a reasonable ammount
> of time keeping the box in sync with sid.   This is becomming an annoyance
> 
> I would really rather take this box back to woody.  
> I can just point apt at woody instead of sid BUT, I doubt me that apt will
> like downgrading many of the packages back to the woody versions.
> 
> Does anyone have any advice that will ease the transition?

Well By way of a summary,

I've set /etc/apt/preferences to:
----
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 1001

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: -1
----
and /etc/apt/sources.list is:
---
deb ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian/ sid  main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian-non-US/ sid/non-US main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian/ woody  main contrib non-free
deb ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian-non-US/ woody/non-US main contrib non-free
---

Now after an apt-get update I have all the indices I need.

---
# apt-get -su dist-upgrade \*/stable
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Calculating Upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ......... 
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED
  .....................
  .....................
  .....................
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 89 downgraded, 0 to remove and 0  not
upgraded.
---
Will quite happily downgrade everything on the system to the stable
counterparts.  I'm not really game to do that.

Nicks, suggestion about apt-show-versions is very helpfull indeed.
--- snip
	console-common/stable uptodate 0.7.14
	console-data/stable uptodate 1999.08.29-24
	console-tools-libs/stable uptodate 1:0.2.3-23.3
	console-tools/stable uptodate 1:0.2.3-23.3
	cpio/unstable uptodate 2.5-1
--- snip

I can use apt-cache policy <pkg_name> to get nice info about versions
etc etc
---
# apt-cache policy tasksel
tasksel:
  Installed: 1.21
  Candidate: 1.18
  Version Table:
 *** 1.21 0
         -1 ftp://ftp.au.debian.org sid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.18 0
       1001 ftp://ftp.au.debian.org woody/main Packages
---
Basically telles me that, tasksel in unstale = 1.21 and stable = 1.18.

I can also use apt-listchnages to checkout the changelog entries for each
package to verify that the downgrade will not break something I'm relying on.

The box has some 250+ packages and I have downgraded all but 89 to the woody
versions.  I'll leave the box for a good week to make sure that no screams come
forth.  Once thats done I'll start to tacle the tougher packages like debconf
and friends.

All in all the process isn't nearly as complicated as I would have thought.
There will be some tricky packages (ones that are only available in sid).

Thanks to all for the help.


Yours Tony

   Jan 22-25 2003           Linux.Conf.AU            http://linux.conf.au/
		  The Australian Linux Technical Conference!